Contents

Selection Tools

Various flavors of selection tools live here. From the top: Move, Marquee Selection, Lasso SelectionQuick Selection, Crop and Eyedropper. The only tool we won't use at all is the Slice Tool (a sub set of the Crop Tool) which is only useful for web work.

Bitmap editing tools

Photoshop is a bitmap editor. These are it's (mostly) vital bitmap editing tools. From the top: the Spot Healing Brush (utterly useless) Brush, the fun and useful Clone, the History Brush (utterly useless), the Eraser and the Gradient. The last two icons contain the Blur, Sharpen, Smudge, Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools which are low-powered tool versions of things that can be found in the filters menu. Rarely useful.

Vector editing tools

Though PS is mainly a bitmap editor it also carries a small set of vector editing tools (btw: bitmap = photos, vector = flat shapes and text). The Pen tool has a rare but interesting use for the digital painter. Its line can be stroked with any of PS's tools. This is useful for drawing perfect curves. Other tools here you can live without.

Miscellaneous tools

Miscellaneous: mostly 3D and the Hand and Zoom tools. These navigation tools, though useful, can be easily covered by learning a few keystrokes.

The bottom of the toolbox

At the bottom of the Toolbox there are no tools at all. There are however, a couple of really useful commands almost all of which are replaceable by simple keystrokes. First there are two squares (black and white are the default but yours might be color). These are the Foreground and Background colors and determine what colors you will be working with. You will find you often need to adjust these by clicking on them. Beneath them is the Screen Modes selector.

Tool keystroke shortcuts

All of the tools have keystroke shortcuts and you would be wise to learn at least some of them. The tool description and shortcuts are labeled in the little yellow tool tips that appear when you hover your mouse over the relevant tool. The hidden, 'alternate' versions of tools can be summoned by pressing Shift before its keystroke (e.g. to go from the round Marquee tool to the rectangular version). Here are a few of the more useful Toolbox keystroke shortcuts: